Last week I attended the 11th Nth Generation Symposium. This is one fantastic event - three days packed with content and a huge demo area. I attended this event for the first time last year after being invited to come to Anaheim by Nth's CTO Dan Molina. This year, I didn't want to leave the event without talking to Dan. He's been a catalyst for change taking Nth into a leadership position in delivering cloud solutions and services.

Having the event at a great location like Disneyland's Grand Californian certainly adds to the magic of the event. It was really tempting to skip a day of the symposium and go play over at the Disney parks but I didn't. Instead, I just looked out my hotel room window to see all the fun and stuck to the sessions.

Throughout the three day agenda, almost every session was focused on cloud. It's interesting to me how times have changed, and quickly. Two years ago, "Cloud" seemed to me to be an overhyped buzz word. I don't think so any more. Interestingly, not a lot has changed - I think it was me that changed. I have been burned in the past by jumping on the "buzz word bandwagon" and I didn't want to do that again. It's pretty clear that Cloud Computing isn't just a buzz word but a significant trend that is having a major impact on IT delivery.

Dan and Nth Generation really are at the forefront of helping customers understand the cloud and their cloud journey. In this podcast with Dan, we covered a lot of topics including me asking him "who shouldn't be considering the cloud". This really is one of the most insightful discussions I've had in a long time.

During my discussion with Dan, we talked about the Cloud Discovery Workshop. Last year at VMworld I was able to talk to Ray Richardson who is a highly in-demand cloud solution architect for HP and often delivers these workshops for customers. Here's a podcast that I did with Ray talking about the workshop.

What do you think? Are you considering Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas) - another term for private cloud - public cloud, or a hybrid cloud? I'd like to hear from you! And if you're in Southern California and are looking for someone to help you in your cloud journey, check out Nth's website and get in touch with them. I highly recommend them!

On a personal note, I always enjoy visiting Orange County, California. It's where I started my career with HP as a Customer Engineer. In fact, if you look at the picture, off in the distance just to the left of the Ferris wheel, you can see a domed building - that's the Anaheim Convention Center and that was one of my first accounts with HP back in the early 80's. Oh the memories!